67 Miles for 67 Years

This year I skipped both the Tulip Festival and the Highland Games, but I'm still on the road - and rail trails.

Trail start

Old bicyclists have a tradition called "riding your age" - rather than acting it, maybe. The summer I turned 65 I made a 65 mile ride, but I skipped 66 because my spine, knees and ankles were too touchy from standing for long hours behind the cash register at the bookstore. In April I reached my official full retirement age and quit work. So I resolved to make a 67 mile trip to ride my age in June.

I decided to try the Cascade Trail, which runs along side Highway 20 and the Skagit River from Burlington to the town of Concrete. The Skagit flooded badly last winter and Hwy. 20 was washed out and closed for several months, reopening on Monday, just a few days before I rode on Thursday. But I was pretty sure that if the trail was still washed out, I could just detour to the highway.

I drove to the Chuckanut Park & Ride lot in Burlington. From there getting through traffic and bad intersections in Burlington and Sedro Woolley was the worst part of the trip, but once I found my way to LaFayette Road it was easy to follow the Bicycle Route 10 signs to get to the Cascade Trail. The gravel trail starts out fairly open and sunny, passing through grassy farms and pastures before getting on to shady forested areas.

Wiseman Creek is the first bridge on the route, just before a flooded section that still has a little water on the trail. It's easily passable, though I did get my socks wet.


At my first rest spot, ten or twelve miles along, I met a young man walking with a small boy. They seemed a little wary of me, but warmed up a bit when I asked about trail conditions ahead. It turned out the man worked on trail repair and maintenance, keeping the grass mowed along the way. I hope I didn't make them regret bringing strangers to their neighborhood.

Some short sections of the trail have new gravel, which is still a little thick to ride through. Other places are fine, loose sand, hard-packed mud or big ballast rocks. But the rough patches are easy to walk through and overall it was easy to ride with 700x32 tires on my touring bike, though I wouldn't try my road bike.

First view of the Skagit River

 

Below is a sort of panorama view of a section of the Skagit River that flooded last winter.

Two bridges are washed out past the town of Lyman. The second bridge, near Hamilton, was knocked off its pilings, and has been spray-painted with a swastika and racist graffiti: NO N---ERS ALLOUD. This seemed like a good place to stop to apply more sunscreen, before detouring to the highway via Cabin Creek Road.

Maybe better to not repair this one?

Highway 20 has wide bike lanes but a fair amount of fast traffic and heavy trucks. Then there's a crossing that is easily visible to cyclists, but not so well marked to slow down car traffic - definitely a "cross at your own risk" spot. Luckily the Thursday morning traffic wasn't too heavy and it was fairly easy to cross over and get back on the trail.

Fresh, new gravel and a restful corridor of cedar trees.

 

The trail is lovely and woodsy from here on. There are a couple of cuts through solid rock walls. Big old maple trees, fir and cedar make the path shady but light-filled. A few miles from the trail end in Concrete there is a deeper wash-out with a small creek still running through, but it is easily passable via some small improvised foot bridges.

You'll know you've come to the town of Concrete when you get to bare gravel and come out into the sun in front of the massive concrete gravel towers.

You can just barely see my bicycle at the base of the towers below. Up the hill behind the towers is a small park with picnic tables, bathrooms, a kiddie spray park and a bike jump park under construction.

There is also a Skagit Transit Park & Ride lot, where a SKAT bus was waiting. I was a little tired but not the least tempted to bail on the ride and take the bus home. After a snack and rest break I rode around the town a little. There is a motel, a laundromat, a few restaurants, an ice cream place, a little theater and some craft shops hoping to catch tourist traffic in the summer - or during ski season?

When I ventured across a small art nouveau-ish bridge at the edge of the main business blocks I discovered what is probably the real reason the town continues to exist: the Baker River Hydroelectric Project. Though much smaller than Ross Dam, the two dams on the Baker River are still a major power source.

For the interest of literary-type people, Tobias Wolff, author of the memoir "This Boy's Life", spent his formative years in Concrete. He hated it so much he resorted to forging documentation to get admitted to a toney upper-class East coast boarding school for boys, where he was even more miserable, until he finally got kicked out. A spell in the army, and then the University of Washington, finally turned him around.

I think about this a lot because I also hated the small town where I grew up in the 1970s, and couldn't wait to get out. Yet now that kind of town seems like it could be a haven (if I didn't need to have a job, and a social life). How is it possible to make places like this not feel like a trap and a dead-end to younger people?

Baker River Dam, seen from Hwy. 20

  

Anyhow, my maps and trail guides show the distance on the trail as about 30 miles each way, plus a few miles from my car at the Chuckanut P&R lot. Thinking I might need to add a some miles to make 67, I meant to try riding up to Lake Shannon. But I couldn't find the right turn-off and didn't feel like adding on any hill-climbing, so I headed back to Hwy. 20 from the dam.

Out on the pavement, my front wheel began to weave and bump: flat tire. I made it to the fire station at Cabin Creek Road, where I found a shady place to change the tube. Then I crossed back to the trail, off the highway, and back to Sedro Wooley. I had made good time on my way up, and was pretty pleased with myself, but it turned out I'd had a steady tailwind the whole way, and I had to work a bit all the way back down. Then I circled around Burlington for four or five miles to make my odometer turn over to 67 miles.

Usually my shoulders are sore at the end of a long ride, and my hands get numb. This time my legs were pretty tired, but I felt good when I got back to the P&R lot. I rested in the shade, had another snack, and was going to finish off the last inch of water in my bottle. But when I took off the cap, there was a surprise: an earwig floating in the dregs of my drink.

It must have got in when I refilled my bottle back in Concrete. 48 hours later, I'm not sick yet. Does anyone know if earwigs carry any parasites or diseases I should worry about?